Excel spreadsheet printing problem - won't collate tabs

[Notsototalnewbie]

I have an excel spreadsheet with about seven tabs.

Often I need to print this to distribute in full at meetings.

If I press print (say 10 copies), select 'entire workbook', and tick the 'collate' box, it still refuses to print the workbook in a collated fashion, it prints 10 of tab A, then 10 of tab B, and so on. So they have to be collated by hand. By me. The only way round this is to send it as 10 separate jobs, which is also a pain.

Anyone know a way round this? (It's a Mac by the way, but I wouldn't have thought that would affect it).

[Jaded]

Print one set to a pdf then print the pdf 10 times?

[Notsototalnewbie]

Unfortunately it treats the pdf printer in the same way and will only print selected tabs one at a time, so you have to pdf each one individually and then you have to combine the pdfs into one and print that file...which is no quicker really.

[Crystal Tips]

A non technical idea.
Can you highlight all the tabs, press print. Then press print another 9 times, all as a serate exercise.
A bit of a pain but probably less than the collating?

[Notsototalnewbie]

I think you are suggesting my current non-technical solution - ie, click 'entire worksheet' and press print ten times, which forces it to collate them as it has to treat them as ten separate jobs. Which is much better than hand collating, but I was wondering if there was a better way...

[scottlington]

Have you tried it without the collate button enabled? Sometimes you can get conflicts between the print settings on the application and those of the printer driver itself.

[tonycollinet]

I think you are suggesting my current non-technical solution - ie, click 'entire worksheet' and press print ten times, which forces it to collate them as it has to treat them as ten separate jobs. Which is much better than hand collating, but I was wondering if there was a better way...

If you can print "entire workbook" to a printer - surely you can do the same to a PDF printer?

[Notsototalnewbie]

I've tried with and without the collate enabled.

Yes tonycollinet, you would think you could do that. But it doesn't, it just prints one tab to the pdf. I have to do this for a quarterly meeting we have, so I fiddle with this problem four times a year and it's always the same.

I really think this is some kind of bug in Excel.

[tonycollinet]

Interesting

I just make a simple workbook with 3 sheets. Then tried to print whole workbook to PDF (Primo PDF)
It only sent the first to sheets (as separate print files)

Added a worksheet
Same issue.

Tried the microsoft image printer instead (prints to tiff files)

Same problem - only the first two worksheets.

[tonycollinet]

I also tried selecting all the worksheets, and printing active sheets - still only the first two printed.

[Notsototalnewbie]

This is what makes me think it is a bug that needs to be fixed. It's not like you're asking it to do something very complex.

[tonycollinet]

I think it is an interaction between excel, and the pdf driver.

When I told the PDF driver to spool the print jobs, it put two pages into one file, the third page into a second file, and failed to print the fourth.

[peterh]

Interesting

I just make a simple workbook with 3 sheets. Then tried to print whole workbook to PDF (Primo PDF)
It only sent the first to sheets (as separate print files)

Added a worksheet
Same issue.

Tried the microsoft image printer instead (prints to tiff files)

Same problem - only the first two worksheets.

I have a four sheet excel file that I have to produce every month and I use the print 'entire workbook' option to send it to pdf.  No problem.  After seeing this thread, I sent two copies directly to the printer and tried turning collate on and off.  Again, no problem.

Having seen your post, I tried with a new workbook and came across similar behaviour.  Two worksheets would be in one pdf and the third into a second file.  When I tried sending two copies of the entire workbook directly to the printer, they always came out collated, even if the box was unticked.

I thought about the differences between the file I know works and the one that doesn't.  One was the print area, so I defined print areas on each sheet of my new file (set print area), and now it works in pdf, but it doesn't look as though I can 'uncollate' it when I send it to the printer!  I haven't got time at the moment to try to figure out why my working file works and the other don't 

It does look like setting the print area might allow the workaraound via a pdf, but it is all very strange!

[Lucky]

Sounds like a bug in Excel.

What version of Excel are you using? And what Version of Windows?

If it's Excel 2003 or 2007, on Vista (or Windows Server 2008), it may be this problem.

If that doesn't fix it, you may be able to work around the problem by printing the document from either OpenOffice or Excel Viewer.

[Notsototalnewbie]

Setting the print area doesn't work for me.

It is Excel 2008 for Mac.